Thank You Apple, for Killing the Optical Drive at Last

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Thank You Apple, for Killing the Optical Drive at Last

You know what was the best news at yesterday's Back to the Mac event? The MacBook Air's Software Reinstall Drive, which finally spells the end of the clunky optical drive.

Apple likes to drop old tech as early as possible. The floppy drive is the classic example, and caused a fuss when it was left out of the original Bondi BLue iMac. FireWire has been on life-support these last few years, flickering in and out of existence on Apple's portables. And while the original Air had no way to load a CD or DVD, you still had to use one via a slow and clunky DVD or CD Sharing feature which let you "wirelessly 'borrow' the optical drive of a nearby Mac or PC" to install software.

Now, though, it is possible to buy an Mac and never have to deal with spinning media again. Hell, you can't even buy a MacBook Air with a hard-drive anymore: inside, the only thing that moves is the fan and the clicking trackpad.

So the bundled restore DVD has been replaced with a typically stylish USB stick, something that will certainly come to other Mac in the future. And good riddance to this battery-sucking, space-gobbling piece of legacy tech. Who needs it? Hell, it's quicker to download a movie these days than it is to rip a DVD.

The one irony here is that the new iLife suite, also announced yesterday, is only available on DVD. Because iLife, unlike iWork, does not require a serial number for activation, there's no download available. Maybe next year, iLife 12 will come on a USB stick, too.